LawLytics Blog

Attorneys that regularly add new content to their law firm websites get more leads and have more chances to turn potential clients into actual clients. Our new content series will look at common mistakes that attorneys make with regard to their content marketing strategies.

Attorneys have been accused of being among the worst offenders when it comes to trafficking in fake reviews online. But what legal professionals may not realize is that purchasing fake reviews and/or incentivizing positive reviews for their law firms goes against legal marketing ethical guidelines — and it’s also against the law.

Google’s ability to battle black hat SEO is constantly improving. And, thanks to AI and other technological advancements, that rate of improvement is increasing rapidly and will only get faster and more precise as time goes on. Read on to learn what this means for your law firm website.

Sometimes just coming up with new ideas for law firm website content is the hardest part of the content marketing process. The newest LawLytics Blog Series will offer up 21 practice area specific content ideas each week that attorneys can cover on their law firm websites.

Technology has had an undeniable effect on the methods that attorneys use to attract potential clients to their law firms. Today, more than one-third of clients begin their search for an attorney online, and seventy percent of firms claim to have generated new cases via their law firm websites. If your firm is in the minority that has yet to launch a website of its own, it’s time to invest in one now.

Google has grown smarter in the past decade. As a result, Google has managed to find — and close — many of the SEO loopholes that used to be exploited by black hat practitioners. Yet, there is a persistent belief that some of the following black hat SEO practices still work.

In this blog post, we provide an excerpt of our latest eBook and discuss the process of “bootstrapping” your site after it receives a penalty from Google, plus a little detail about how to overcome two specific penalties.

It’s not surprising that many SEO providers market their services by claiming that they can get your site to “the top of Google,” or by flaunting their “partnership” with the search engine. The truth of the matter, however, is less exciting than the promises made by misleading SEO salespeople.

Google is always on the lookout for sites that violate its guidelines and, if you (or a third-party SEO provider you hired) operate in black hat territory, you can bet that you will eventually be caught, and that your law firm website will likely suffer. Learn more about Google penalties in this blog post.

In our new eBook release, “Playing the SEO Game to Win: All In on a Losing Hand,” we outline eleven high-profile search engine penalties that Google has applied to big companies for stepping outside of its Webmaster Guidelines.

In the third and final release of our “Summer of SEO” series of eBooks, we offer a look at eleven high-profile Google penalties by laying out the guideline violated by each company, the specific consequence those companies faced for failing to play by the rules, as well as the ultimate outcome of each penalty, including how it was eventually overcome (if it was overcome).

How do you get potential clients to visit your law firm’s website? The answer to that question is fairly simple — leverage the content on your site to offer your potential clients the sort of information that they are likely to search for online and you can maximize the chances that those potential clients find your law firm website’s content and choose to engage with it.

Occasionally, Google’s algorithmic updates lead to sweeping changes in the placement of sites on search engine results pages (SERPs). When such algorithmic rollouts are instituted, attorneys who follow the LawLytics recipe for effective, content-based SEO and online marketing practices can rest easy knowing that their sites are likely to be rewarded on SERPs for adhering to Google’s guidelines.

If your law firm is still operating without a website in the modern internet era, it’s likely losing business to firms that put more effort into their online presence. If your law firm already has a website, you’re on the right track. If not, it’s time to start thinking seriously about your law firm’s online marketing strategy. Learn more in this blog post.

This is the first post in a series about black hat SEO — the optimization methods that do not follow search engine guidelines and that focus on tricking search engines into ranking subpar websites and web pages higher than they would normally merit. Posts in the series will focus on the past, present, and future of black hat SEO tactics and why attorneys should avoid these methods when building their law firm’s web presence.

In the words of Mike McDermott (played by Matt Damon) in the 1998 film Rounders, which is a film centered around the game of poker: “If you can’t spot the sucker in your first half hour at the table, then you are the sucker.” Don’t be the sucker when it comes to marketing your law firm online. Read on to see how we cover that concept in our second SEO eBook, “Betting on a Long Shot.”

Google recently updated its search quality evaluator guidelines. These guidelines are used by the thousands of search quality raters who are hired by Google to evaluate search results and help Google improve its search algorithms. Here’s what attorneys need to know about the most recent update.

Pay-per-click advertising is often used by attorneys (and, for that matter, sold to attorneys) as a solution to their online marketing problems. However, it’s also one of the most misunderstood and misused approaches to online attorney marketing. Tune into this episode to learn about three problems with pay-per-click advertising.

When attorneys go on ‘tilt’ as a result of online marketing frustrations, the chance that they begin throwing money away on SEO tactics that either won’t work for their websites or might even hurt them in the long run increases drastically. Here are three possible reasons that an attorney may go on ’tilt.’

Google’s algorithms have significantly improved over the past decade and it’s become much harder to trick the search engine. That fact hasn’t stopped some attorneys — or their SEO providers — from trying to use shortcut tactics. In this episode, we discuss why bluffs don’t pay in online law firm marketing, as well as a number of tactics that attorneys should avoid.

With the meteoric rise in the use of digital assistants and voice search, the digital marketing world is abuzz about how voice may disrupt digital marketing as we know it. That disruption may be even bigger than the one associated with the invention of smartphones....

If you own and operate a website for your law firm, you may have already seen one or more unsolicited SEO reports about your site. But before you allow one of these reports to send you into a panic about your law firm website’s performance and visibility, it’s a good idea to make sure you are asking the right questions about the validity of such reports. You will want to be able to evaluate these reports objectively in order to decide whether or not they offer any information that can actually benefit your law firm.